007 Legends Wii U Review

It really shouldn’t be this hard to make a decent James Bond game, should it? As far as source material goes, 50 years of 007’s big screen adventures should have provided the team at Eurocom with a wealth of blockbuster stunts, style and subterfuge to draw from. Unfortunately, it seems like the development team has merely skimmed the back covers of a few of the DVDs in the James Bond box set and then decided to interpret them in the form of a poor man’s Call of Duty. As far as tributes go, this is like raising your champagne flute to toast someone and then using it to glass them in the eye.

Here’s the setup for the single-player campaign: in a scene from the upcoming Skyfall, Daniel Craig’s 007 is accidentally shot by a female sniper whilst fending off an enemy on the roof of a moving train. Bond then plummets down into a river below, and while his lungs fill up with water he’s struck by a series of flashbacks to his previous adventures, each of which serve as the five different missions in the game.

Those missions are taken (slightly out of chronological order) from Goldfinger, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, License to Kill, Die Another Day and Moonraker, with a sixth mission based on Skyfall to be released later as free DLC. Each mission is set in the present day since it’s Daniel Craig’s Bond replacing the likes of Connery and Moore, but despite that justification it still feels a little odd to be breaking into Blofeld’s alpine lair and taking surveillance snaps with your smartphone, or watching one of Goldfinger’s henchmen fly out of the ejector seat in a modern Aston Martin DBS rather than the original DB5.

In fact all of it just feels off. While there are some moments that are faithful to the source material – such as the cutscene in which Bond is strapped to a slab of gold and sweating on Goldfinger’s crotch-searing laser – for the most part 007 Legends is barely recognizable as a Bond experience, much less a tribute to the series’ proud history. It may as well be called Call of Duty: Bond Ops, it lifts so much from Activision’s flagship shooter series. You can practically see Eurocom ticking off its development checklist as you go: mounted mini-gun sequence? Check. Slow-motion door breach? Check. Enemies that respawn infinitely until the player moves to a designated checkpoint? Checkity-check-check.

The fact that it so shamelessly copies from the CoD playbook would be almost forgivable if it actually did a good job of it, but 007 Legends is just so painfully dull. None of its set pieces are at all memorable, and each mission is more or less structured in the exact same way – with Bond machine-gunning everyone to death on his way into a villain's base, before taking some photos and scanning fingerprints in their office, and then machine-gunning everyone to death on his way out again. It's not gung ho; it's ho hum.

The Fort Knox level from Goldfinger now looks like a D-Day landing.

If you choose to play it in a stealthier manner then you're in for an even worse time. For a game that seems hell bent on giving a modern makeover to some of Bond’s former exploits, it comes as quite a shock that its stealth mechanics are so archaic. Bond moves silently when crouched so you can sneak up behind enemies and knock them out or shoot them with a silenced weapon. However, the fact that you can’t move bodies or peek around corners coupled with the near useless line of sight indicators for guards means you rarely stay hidden for long, and once your cover is blown then you're rushed by every enemy in the vicinity and the firefights resume. The frustrations with the sneak mechanics are further exacerbated by the mandatory stealth sections of the game, which hit you with an instant 'mission fail' screen if you're spotted. Seriously, if stealth is your bag then go and pick up Dishonored.

To be fair, the developer has made some attempts to alleviate the monotony that sets in with the repetitive shooting and the frustration inherent to the stealth system. 007 Legends also features some overly simplistic hacking mini-games, along with some poorly controlled driving missions and some hilarious boss fights that all play out like a cross between a sluggish quicktime event and a game of Punch Out!!

007 Legends' only redeeming feature is its multiplayer. While the online game may have had its player count cut down to 12 from the 16 supported in GoldenEye: Reloaded, it's the four-player split-screen mode that stands out simply because same-screen multiplayer has become such a rarity in the FPS genre. Which is some good news for the group of gamers out there that prefer to playfully trash talk their mates on the couch beside them rather than scream obscenities at strangers through a USB headset, although if you already own GoldenEye: Reloaded then you're not missing much by avoiding 007 Legends.

007 Legends doesn't even sound like a good idea on paper, and it's presented in such a half-hearted manner. Why force Daniel Craig's likeness into each of the five previous generations of Bond, if you're not even going to bother to get his voice? (And his soundalike is atrocious.) Why include a driving level in the License to Kill mission if you're not going to let the player do that awesome stunt where Timothy Dalton's Bond balanced a Kenworth truck on its side in order to dodge an RPG round? Why feature the character of Jinx from Die Another Day if you're not going to feature Halle Berry's voice or likeness? Why include Moonraker at all? It's almost like the developer has gone out of its way to actively disappoint fans, and if this game isn't for them then who exactly is it for?

Remember the invisible car that Bond drove in Die Another Day? Eurocom doesn't.

Lastly, it should be pointed out that the Skyfall mission DLC isn’t some optional extra, it’s actually the end of the campaign. Otherwise, you play through the five missions on the disc and once you finish Moonraker it abruptly transitions straight into the credits. We can only assume that the Skyfall mission has been held off so as not to spoil the new movie. But they’ve already spoilt five old movies by including them on the disc, so why stop there?

Tough though it may be to imagine 007 Legends getting any worse, its late-arriving port for the Wii U finds a few niggling ways to sour the experience further. I had hope for this one visually when I noticed that all the irritating screen tearing from the 360 version was absent, but those hopes were soundly dashed once the bullets started flying. Despite the system's competent internals, and the game's low graphical fidelity, the frame rate is well shy of the other console versions, which on its own would be a disappointment. Sadly, that isn't the only problem here.

The most crippling and puzzling issue is actually the aiming, which was perfectly fine when the game first shipped. This version employs a large dead zone, and moving the analog stick within this zone doesn't shift your reticule at all. It simply accelerates it clumsily once you move past the threshold, making it far harder to hit your target than it should be. What's more, the devs failed to make any interesting use of the gamepad, something you'd imagine to be a no brainer with a protagonist that loves gadgets so well. Finally, the online multiplayer has taken a turn for the worse, with shaky netcode and a baffling inability to create custom game sessions and invite friends.

Needless to say, there isn't much reason to grab 007 Legends in the first place, but if you're a Bond diehard hellbent on owning it, you'll want to pass on the Wii U version, and hop the fence to the slightly greener pastures of Microsoft and Sony.

THE VERDICT

Last year Eurocom delivered GoldenEye: Reloaded, an HD remake which was arguably the best James Bond game since well, the original GoldenEye 64. Unfortunately the developer hasn't been able to maintain that trajectory with 007 Legends; an abhorrent 'tribute' to the history of the British super spy that doesn't just take liberties - it takes the piss. At a time when early reports suggest the celluloid Bond is reaching a new high with Skyfall, it's a shame that his video game counterpart has reached his digital downfall. If you're really dying for a Call of Duty-style shooter experience, then sit tight as Black Ops II has likely got more money than God behind it and it's only a month away.